“I see nothing for’t but to send little Eva off to Weston!”
Sam and his wife both shuddered at the word, and turned back, without answering, into the house, where Eva sat upon the floor like a child, moving her head and her hands in a restless fashion, and singing low to herself aimless words and snatches of songs, all in a wearisome, tuneless monotone, enough to drive a sane person mad.
She was ill, too, and coughed often between her chanting, from a terrible cold she had contracted that night when she was lost on the mountain.
She did not recognize her kind friends, and no light of reason had glimmered in her big sombre, dark eyes since Sam Brown had brought her home, drenched and shivering, in his kind arms.
Tears came into Goody’s eyes as she said sorrowfully: “I see nothing for’t, as he said, but to send the poor thing off to Weston!”
The nearest insane asylum was located at Weston.
CHAPTER VII.
A WEIRD FUNERAL.
When old Doctor Ludington in his young manhood inherited the pretty estate, Fernside, from an uncle, and went there with his young wife to live, he left a home twenty miles away that had sheltered the Ludingtons for several generations, and where, in their near-by burial grounds, rested every scion of the race that had died in America.
So it was deemed meet and right that Rupert Ludington be taken back to the old-home place to rest among his kindred.